 - The Riverton Police Department’s new Community Service Officer program has provided a welcome reduction in the workload for other RPD staff members since its launch last year, local law enforcement officials reported last month. ){kind=link}
(Riverton, WY) – The Riverton Police Department’s new Community Service Officer program has provided a welcome reduction in the workload for other RPD staff members since its launch last year, local law enforcement officials reported last month.
“I can’t express to you how important these guys are (and) how much they have taken off patrol shoulders in this last year,” Lt. Heath Wharton said during the RPD’s annual report to the Riverton City Council on March 18. “These two guys (are) outstanding.”
CSO Jeff Manning said he and his fellow CSO Connor Knop have fielded more than 630 calls for service over the last year, responding to things like VIN checks, welfare checks, parking issues, abandoned vehicles, property damage accidents, citizen disputes, cold thefts, medical assists, traffic control requests, code violations and “a myriad of citizen complaints” about snow, or noise, or “any of those types of things.”
“The CSOs have been really great to have,” RPD Chief Eric Hurtado said. “They’ve saved time to where the (patrol) officers don’t have to go to the … lower-priority calls.”
The CSOs also do things “that never get generated as an incident” in RPD call logs, Manning said – like stopping by local elementary schools to help out during pick-up and drop-off times.
They’ve also provided the RPD with an “increased presence in our community” by “making regular patrols” and engaging with local civic organizations like the Downtowners, Hurtado said
Wharton expressed special appreciation for the fact that the CSOs take care of fingerprinting now – a task that is “not fun” given that the RPD is “kind of behind the technology curve here, (so) we still do them the old-fashioned way, with ink and paper.”
“Those guys are important,” Wharton said.”They do a lot of good work for us, and they free up (patrol) officers’ time.”
Those patrol officers need that extra time, Wharton said, because Riverton has “a substantially higher crime rate than any of the surrounding areas.”
He shared statistics with the council showing that, in 2024, the RPD responded to 9,841 calls for service, of which 2,160 – or 21.9 percent – resulted in criminal charges.
For comparison, he said, the Lander Police Department responded to 6,763 calls for service in 2024, of which 782 – or 11.6 percent – resulted in criminal cases, and the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office responded to 4,491 calls for service in 2024, of which 516 – or 11.5 percent – resulted in crimes.
“That means that one out of every five calls that we respond to generates a criminal charge, (while) in Lander … about one out of every 10 calls that they go to ends up in a criminal charge,” Wharton said.
He added that, based on the data he collected, “there is a one in 160 chance of you being a victim of any and all crime in Riverton.”
“That’s … higher than the national average (and) higher than the rest of Wyoming,” Wharton noted.
The RPD’s Victim/Witness Advocates served more than 500 people in 2024, Det. Sgt. Eric Smits said during his report, including 124 who were victims of domestic and/or family violence, 123 who were victims of adult physical assault, and 79 who were victims of stalking or harassment.
Other crimes on the Victim/Witness Advocates list for 2024 included vehicular victimization (27), child sexual abuse/assault (25), burglary (24), child physical abuse/neglect (22), animal incident (21), adult sexual assault (16), violation of a protection order (16), property damage (12), DUI incidents (6), survivors of homicide victims (5), robbery (4), elder abuse/neglect (2), and sexual abuse as child (1).
Hurtado pointed out that, of the violent crimes the RPD responded to in 2023, most were perpetrated by people who were “known associates” of the victim, while only 10-20 percent involved “strangers.”
For more information, call the RPD at (307) 856-4891.